Custom templates

This section describes how to create custom templates and generate artifacts from them by CUBA CLI.

1. Templates basics

All user templates should be located in the $USER_HOME/.haulmont/cli/templates directory. The template itself is a directory with descriptor file template.xml and files used in generation, optionally divided by CUBA Platform version in separate version directories.

So, the template structure may be following:

.
+--template.xml
+--6.8.5
|  +--... // template files for CUBA Platform 6.8.5
+--6.9.0
   +--... // template files for CUBA Platform 6.9.0

or following:

.
+--template.xml
+--... // template files for any CUBA version

CUBA CLI uses Apache Velocity template engine. You can read about how to create Apache Velocity templates on its documentation.

2. template.xml structure

Basically, template.xml has following structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<template xmlns="http://schemas.haulmont.com/cuba/cli/template.xsd"
          name="entity">
    <questions>
        <!-- Questions block. All answers will be stored to the CliContext
            and will be available to Apache Velocity by ${modelName.questionName}.-->
        <plain name="name" caption="Entity Name"/>
        <plain name="packageName" caption="Package Name"/>
        <options name="entityType" caption="Entity type">
            <option>Persistent</option>
            <option>Persistent embedded</option>
            <option>Not persistent</option>
        </options>
    </questions>
    <operations>
        <!-- Template processing block. Operations may be of two types: transform and copy.

             Transform operations indicate that the part of the template, specified in the 'src'
             attribute, should be processed by Apache Velocity, and result stored in 'dst' directory.
             Absence of the 'dst' attribute means that result should be stored at project root.

             Copy operations do the same, without processing by the template engine. It may be necessary
             for such things as images or other resources that don't need to be processed by the template
             engine and may be accidentally corrupted by it.-->
        <transform src="modules"/>
    </operations>
</template>

3. Template example

Let's create our own template. For brevity, simply copy the file structure and the content of cuba-cli/src/main/resources/com/haulmont/cuba/cli/cubaplugin/templates/entity to directory ~/.haulmont/cli/templates/entity. Then, in that directory create a file template.xml. Fill it with template.xml example from section 2.

In terminal, go to your CUBA Platform project. Launch CLI.

To generate an artifact with your template, use command custom-template teplateName. For our case, the templateName will be entity.